


A Window for Every Book

by lizardking



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 17:45:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1992024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizardking/pseuds/lizardking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amy Santiago, minus Jake Peralta for an indeterminate number of months, does a few things differently and many things the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Window for Every Book

_Months 1-4_

In Jake Peralta’s absence, and she feels strange calling it an absence in this personal sense, Amy Santiago gets a cat. Or rather, a cat gets her, because someone who works the hours she does has no business owning plants, let alone the yowling, shedding, needy monster she inherits from her grandmother on Long Island.

The funeral is on a perfectly nice day, which upsets Amy further, since in the movie of her life it always, always rains at funerals, the physical dreariness a perfect encapsulation of an emotional state. She wears a black dress with pops of white. She does her hair. Teddy has to work, which is absolutely fine, though he sends dozens of flowers and makes a sizable donation to the New York City chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. Gina, Rosa, Terry, Boyle, Hitch, and Scully all show up, somehow. Who’s on duty, Amy wonders, halfway through the eulogy, when they attend events en masse?

Captain Holt arrives at the church to pay his respects, too, which both pleases Amy and worries her, because as nice as it is that he cares, she doesn’t want to appear as she doesn’t know the scale of things. Amy loves her grandmother and they were close, but Gran was 87 years old. Amy tells herself that you’re only allowed to be so sad about the death of people who have lived a very full life, something akin to how you can only salt a choice steak so much before it’s ruined. (Amy doesn’t really know—she just recalls Boyle yapping about a dinner where the meat was so over-salted he could see it glistening from across the table, six people down. The soul of a poet and the gut of a gourmand, that one, and potentially a bit too much heart for the NYPD.) But if someone Jake’s age dies, or younger, even, children, teenagers, the measurements must be different.

Her mother grabs her hand, clutching it so tightly that Amy fears for her bones, and that’s when Amy realizes that she is crying.

\-----

“Last chance, Amy,” her mother says.

The house is a wreck, it’s been sold but it’s not empty yet. It’s the split-level her grandparents lived in up until her grandfather’s death years ago, now, and her grandmother had lived there until she needed full time care. Packing up a life’s worth of possessions takes ages, and Amy has been back out on Long Island nearly every weekend, trying to help her mother decide what to sell or keep or give away. And every weekend, Amy returns to Brooklyn with something else—a teapot; more hand-crafted doilies that she at first defiantly displays, then puts away; several vintage leather handbags from the `70s. Now her mother is trying to get her to take a stack of obscure cookbooks and a half-broken wooden screen.

“I wish I could, Mom, but I really can’t,” Amy says. “I don’t have the space.” Sweat drips in her eye, and she wishes disparately for a cigarette, or for a murder, anything. She’s been checking her phone and her pager incessantly. When her phone does finally ring, it’s not work, it’s Teddy. She answers it brightly, and they make plans for a dinner date that evening at Sal’s, their favorite neighborhood place for pizza and red sauce pasta. She loves so many parts of Teddy; one day she’ll love the whole person.

\----

Teddy snores. Used to be that Amy could fall asleep after poking him a few times, but lately nothing seems to work. She gets out of bed, sliding out quietly so her boyfriend doesn’t wake, and pulls on a long t-shirt. She makes her way out to her kitchen, where she's left her laptop, puts water on for tea and contemplates what, exactly, is wrong with her lately, why nothing that is normal adds up.

Somewhere in the hollow of her chest she knows exactly what it is—two months without Jake doing something ridiculous at the precinct, without Jake as her partner racking up arrests, without Jake to talk to or fight with, without Jake to make her laugh when she absolutely should not be laughing. She spends too much time thinking about their last conversation, the idiotic, poorly worded, half-assed non-confession confession. She feels her color rise, her cheeks burn, and bites back a snort—Jake can still make her mad, even without being physically present. That’s comforting. It’s also pathetic. He is her coworker. Colleague. Friend.

She opens her Macbook and clicks through her email drafts. She’s written Jake dozens of missives, not sent, of course, she doesn’t want to do anything to fuck up his mission. Many of them are just one or two lines long, like, _“You total bastard, I just found that banana in my desk drawer,”_ or _“I now have more monthly arrests than you hahahaha,”_ or _“Captain Holt told me he liked my sweater today and it’s that one you always told me made me look like your aunt Mildred, so SUCK IT PERALTA!!!!”_

She starts a new one with _“Dear Jake”_ because she is feeling sentimental, but deletes it when she thinks about how his ego would inflate like a helium balloon if he ever found out. She already suspects that Gina, who is totally out of the loop and still in touch with him, has been watching her closely. Gina doesn’t actually know shit, but she has weird instincts. And Jake has known Gina forever. Amy doesn’t think it’s a good idea to underestimate her.

\----

Amy and Teddy are out drinking one night when Teddy asks her, flat out, whether their relationship is any good for her.

“Because I like you so much,” he says. He is earnest and kind and good looking, and he promises an orderly life, everything she’s ever wanted. “But I can’t figure out what you’re thinking.”

Even though a bar is pretty much a terrible place to break up with someone, she doesn’t even try to pretend that this isn’t what she wants. She does, however, run through the usual excuses—work is insane, she’s exhausted, maybe the timing wasn’t right. She chugs her glass of wine, and Teddy hails her a cab. It’s so civilized.  

It’s Gina who takes her out the next weekend. (“You’re even more boring than usual. There’s no body shot emoji but I’ve created an internet petition and I already have 200 signatures.”) Rosa joins them and they drink silver tequila and convince a very attractive guy to sign Gina’s Change.org petition. He licks the salt off Amy’s inner wrist, and it surprises Amy by feeling good. Still, Amy goes home alone.

When she wakes up, hungover, it’s to the sound of her apartment buzzer. When she pushes the intercom and hears her mother’s voice, she’s disappointed, though why it would have been Jake after all these months, she hasn’t the foggiest idea. Plus, Jake has a key from the time she went on vacation and asked him to check her mail and pick up her _New York Times_ because she doesn’t trust the efficiency of the post office hold system and her neighbors steal her newspaper if it gets left unattended too long. He hasn’t used the buzzer since.

In her fuzzy state she forgets to ask why her mother is there, which Amy realizes was a huge mistake when she opens the door and sees her mom with a cat carrier and a tote bag full of felt mice and treats.

“No,” Amy says. “No, no, no, no.”

Her mom just pushes right past her.

“Somebody has to take care of Paschall,” Mrs. Santiago says. “A cat will be good for you. You’re allergic to dogs, you won’t be all by yourself, and you’ll have somebody to talk to. Grandma would want you to have him. She worried about you.”

“Something, Mom, it’s not human.”

Her mother rolls her eyes at her, and Amy swears it’s like looking in a mirror. So that’s how Amy ends up with a cranky six-year-old cat. Paschall sheds everywhere, and Amy finds herself vacuuming every other day to keep her apartment the way she likes it. She has to cover her couch in a blanket so the fur doesn’t work itself into the fibers, and curses her mother for turning her into a single, nearly-30 cat lady. Paschall, for his part, has trouble sleeping, and wakes Amy up regularly between 3 and 4 am. Amy invests in a squirt bottle and apologizes to her next door neighbor for the fact that she’s pretty sure Paschall cries constantly while she’s gone. One day, she takes a minute to inspect him up close, and realizes this cat has the longest incisors she’s ever seen.

“It’s going to kill me,” she tells Boyle in the break room the morning after her discovery.

“Awwwww,” Boyle says. “It loves you.”

“Yeah, like a stalker loves his victim,” Amy grumbles. “Right before he kills her so no one else can have her.”

“Whoa,” Scully says. He folds down his paper. “Dark.”

Amy huffs out in the bullpen. For what’s maybe the thousandth time since he went undercover, she wishes Jake was lounging out there in the desk next to hers after rigging her chair to somehow split apart when she sits down. And for the thousandth time, Amy considers the very real possibility that she’s lost her mind.

A body drops, Amy’s up, and she is so, so relieved. She has serious work to do, a life to lead. She starts, however, by cleaning out her email drafts, deleting everything, and unsubscribing from all but three of the e-newsletters she’s somehow signed up for. She keeps notifications for Barney’s warehouse sale, _New York Magazine_ ’s weekly entertainment digest, and alerts from the online lingerie shop she likes because they carry what she has determined to be the perfect mix of practical and pretty. Just in case.  


End file.
